A mediaevalist trying to be a philosopher and a philosopher trying to be a mediaevalist write about theology, philosophy, scholarship, books, the middle ages, and especially the life, times, and thought of the Doctor Subtilis, the Blessed John Duns Scotus.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Nature, Artifacts, and Machines 2

Later in the post I discussed in Part 1, Dr Torley appears to admit at least some of what I've been saying about the difference between natural things and artifacts. I quote:

Should living things be modeled on ships and statues, the products of techne or “art,”?That depends. If you’re trying to explain what it means to be alive, then ships won’t help you; they have no intrinsic finality. . .

Here I distinguish. The parts of living things have intrinsic biological functions. A living thing would not be what it is without these functions. The parts of ships do not have intrinsic functions. A ship’s finality is extrinsic; it is an assemblage of parts. We are agreed so far.

However, it doesn’t follow from this that the parts of a living thing have a natural tendency to come together in the first place. On the available evidence, I would say that the parts that went into the making of the first living cell on Earth were indeed arranged to serve an end they have no tendency otherwise to serve. In that respect, the analogy with a ship is perfect. A ship has to be assembled, and so did the first living thing.

The difference is that having been put together, the parts of a living thing tend to hang together in such a way that we can indeed speak of them as serving the good of the whole. For instance, the parts of a living thing exhibit “dedicated functionality,” right down to the tiniest molecule: every part of a living thing subserves the good of the whole. Also, living things have a master program that controls not only their operations, but their reproduction as well. And in their design, living things exhibit a nested hierarchy all the way down to the smallest piece. Ships are not built like that.

I agree with what Dr Torley says here about the differences between how the parts are related to the whole in a ship and in a living thing. Where I disagree is in his additional assumption, which is that despite these differences living things are built. The problem I see here is that things like ships are the kinds of things that are built, whereas living things are not the kinds of things that are built but the kinds of things which grow. The marvelous interrelation of parts of to whole which he recognizes is intimately bound up with the fact that the parts of a living things are not collected and then assembled; rather the living thing itself produces them. When I first began to exist, I had no bones or skin or hair or blood, but I grew them. And this is the way that the parts of all living things come to be: not by being assembled but by being grown, produced by the form of the whole after the initial act of generation.

I therefore see no reason to assume that "the parts that went into the making of the first living cell on Earth were indeed arranged to serve an end they have no tendency otherwise to serve." This way of putting it already assumes that the first living cell on Earth was produced by making an arrangement of parts. But all observation tells us that, while artifacts are produced this way, living things are not.

By the way, what are we taking to be the "parts" here? There's a long way to go from prime matter to proximate matter. Is Dr Torley thinking of an assemblage out of quarks, out of atoms, out of proteins, or what? In any case, he seems to presume rather than argue that the first cell was manufactured out of parts rather than produced in some other way, despite the fact that there is apparently no evidence for any living thing ever being produced this way, and despite the fact of behaving completely unlike a manufactured object once produced.

(Having said all this and falling, so far, on Dr Feser's side, I should note here that it seems perfectly legitimate to note how Aquinas and others have likened God to an architect, a craftsman, etc., in talking about God's production of the universe. However, I think there's an important distinction to be made between thinking of God as the craftsman or architect of the entire universe, whereby he chooses to make, rather than generate, something other than himself by exemplary and efficient causality, and thinking of God as being inside an already-existing world of natural substances and using their materials to cobble together artifacts. It's one thing to say that in a sense the cosmos, the ordered whole of the world, is an artifact of God's; it's another thing to say that the structure of the cell is an artifact in the way that the divinely-inscribed tables of the ten commandments are an artifact, while Mt Sinai is not.)

Dr Torley writes:

But God can indeed take raw materials with no inherent tendency to form a living thing, and assemble them together, as an artificer might. He could have made Adam from the dust of the ground, even if He did not in fact. And doesn’t the Bible say that He could make children of Abraham from stones, if He wished?

Now I don't deny at all that God could make things in this way. After all, he could also directly inscribe the ten commandments. For Scotus it follows from the notion of omnipotence that whatever God could do through a secondary cause he could do without that secondary cause, immediately. So usually God creates a tree by providentially sustaining the whole ordered and law-governed cosmos whereby the seed falls from its parent, is planted in the ground, and through the operation of its intrinsic substantial form grows to full flourishing. But he certainly could also create a tree ex nihilo, or turn a stone into a tree, or whatever.

Did God make the first living thing like that? I don’t know. ID says nothing about the modus operandi of the creator. But He might have done it that way.

But it seems that Dr Torley did say something about the modus operandi of the creator a little while ago when he said, "A ship has to be assembled, and so did the first living thing."

4 comments:

David
said...

"The problem I see here is that things like ships are the kinds of things that are built, whereas living things are not the kinds of things that are built but the kinds of things which grow. The marvelous interrelation of parts of to whole which he recognizes is intimately bound up with the fact that the parts of a living things are not collected and then assembled; rather the living thing itself produces them."

That's fine as long as you have a living thing to produce them in the first place. I think that when Dr. Torley says there's no "natural" way to produce a living thing he means, in context, from something non-living — the old "a cause can't give what it doesn't have". Aristotle didn't have this problem, because he simply accepted an eternal universe where bacteria could have reproduced themselves forever. But if you start with a Big Bang, you've got nothing but raw electrons and protons and so forth, so nothing can "grow". The very first life-form had to be "assembled" according to mere physics, one way or another. At least, if it happened "naturally". And that, surely, is the point of ID: that you can't here from there; the only natural way to get an organism is for it to grow, which means that if there was a "first" one, it had to be created specially somehow — or else that there is more to mere physics than mere physics!

I'm not considering the question of origins here. I'm pulling Socrates' card from the Meno and insisting that we can't ask how something comes to be with any expectation of success before we first clarify what that thing is. If the ID argument goes like this:

1. Living things, or their parts, are machine-like.

2. Machine-like things much have machine-like origins, i.e. be assembled by a designer.

3. Therefore living things must be assembled by a designer.

then I have to reject the argument, because I deny the major premise. Living things and their parts are not like machines in the relevant sense.

That doesn't mean that I buy any particular story on the origins of life. I'm not even addressing any such stories.

Thanks for answering my meandering questions. (And now for some more!) I would reply to Socrates that even if we know only part of something's nature, we may still be able to know part of its origins. And I would expand the argument a bit:

1) Either living things are machine-like (in the relevant way) or they are not.2) If they are machine-like, then they were "assembled" (in the relevant sense) by a designer3) Therefore living things necessarily imply a designer OR living things are not machine-like4) Therefore materialism is false (the possible chain of designers terminates outside the universe) or else materialism is false (because the nature of non-machines extends "outside" the physical universe)

Now, I agree that "origins" are not the whole issue here, but I don't think they can be completely put aside. Above you said, "The problem I see here is that things like ships are the kinds of things that are built, whereas living things are not the kinds of things that are built but the kinds of things which grow." But not all living things grow! If every organism grew, then every organism would have a "parent"; but then there would be an infinite number of parents, and thus the universe would have to be infinitely old. (Which is a philosophically plausible position, of course. I believe that God could have created an beginningless universe if He had wanted to. But science and Scripture indicate otherwise.)

So at some point there had to be at least one living organism that wasn't grown or generated. The Darwinian answer is that organisms are machines and so all growing or generating is really just "assembling", and thus is reducible to the ordinary laws of physics. If that's not true, then something else had to happen to get the first organism.

Dr. Sullivan: "I'm not considering the question of origins here. I'm pulling Socrates' card from the Meno and insisting that we can't ask how something comes to be with any expectation of success before we first clarify what that thing is."

I don't have an objection to focusing on the nature of living organisms, setting aside on speculations about origins. It is on the nature of living things that I would like to invite you to reconsider your picture.

Dr. Sullivan: "... I deny the major premise. Living things and their parts are not like machines in the relevant sense."

If we had or found a preprogrammed, robotic aquatic vessel that could autonomously propel itself through the water and perform various tasks, I think you would call that artificial like a jet. True?

If those tasks included scavenging materials, breaking these down, and constructing a new such vessel with the same programming, would it stop being artificial?

Now suppose that the process of assembly involved constructing a highly efficient rotary motor with propeller. Suppose this assembly required building a diverse set of parts, each according to detailed specifications. And then these parts had to be assembled together in a very particular coordinated order of staged assembly, just as building a house or other complex structure requires careful, controlled, staged assembly. Suppose further that a series of specialized machines are required to perform these assembly steps, and that those machines in turn are also constructed from assembled parts according to specific instructions and a detailed coordinated assembly process. Suppose further that all of this is subject to further mechanisms responsible for quality control, so that assembly can be stopped if certain defects are detected, thereby avoiding wasted materials and effort.

How does it change matters if it is the case that I have just described how cells function, such as to assemble the bacterial flagellum (it's motorized rotary propeller), and not just at some speculative point of origin, but ever cell, every day?

We can take this one important step further. This ability to assemble molecular machines as needed from preprogramed instructions is one of the essential properties of living organisms.

If cells could only "grow" their parts by copying an existing part of that same kind, cellular life could not function. The key essential quality is that reproduction copies the information and programming, which drives a process of on-demand assembly of parts and machines and machines to assemble other machines -- all as needed according to the robotic preprogramming.

If you are not yet prepared to believe that cells and all life essentially depend upon the ability to assemble parts and machines and machines that assemble other machines as a necessary aspect of their fundamental nature -- what they are -- then at least consider this. What would be the implications if that were/is true?

Would cells be "natural" or "artificial" if that were/is the case?

[p.s. I realize that you have been cautious about venturing into waters that involve details outside your expertise, such as in biology. However, I would say without reservation that I am glad that you have and I value your thoughts and interactions with the subject.]